Columbia University
Department of Philosophy
PhD
Cleveland, Ohio, United States of America
  •  4
    Do the humanities create knowledge?
    Cambridge University Press. 2023.
    We often think of people as falling into one of two very different kinds: people who are into science, math, and engineering, or people who are into history, philosophy, and literature. This book takes readers behind the scenes to show them the unexpected unity underlying efforts to understand our experiences.
  •  8
    An argument that science is indeed 'socially constructed' but in a way that exposes it to a Darwinian version of variability and selection which ensures its success.
  •  14
    Introduction: Testing philosophical theories
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 59 68-73. 2016.
  •  77
    Why do funding agencies favor hypothesis testing?
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (3): 363-374. 2013.
    Exploratory inquiry has difficulty attracting research funding because funding agencies have little sense of how to detect good science in exploratory contexts. After documenting and explaining the focus on hypothesis testing among a variety of institutions responsible for distinguishing between good and bad science, I analyze the NIH grant review process. I argue that a good explanation for the focus on hypothesis testing—at least at the level of science funding agencies—is the fact that hypoth…Read more
  •  310
    From Necessary Chances to Biological Laws
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (2): 279-295. 2013.
    In this article, I propose a new way of thinking about natural necessity and a new way of thinking about biological laws. I suggest that much of the lack of progress in making a positive case for distinctively biological laws is that we’ve been looking for necessity in the wrong place. The trend has been to look for exceptionlessness at the level of the outcomes of biological processes and to build one’s claims about necessity off of that. However, as Beatty (1995) observed, even when we are luc…Read more
  •  88
    Perverse engineering
    Philosophy of Science 75 (4): 437-446. 2008.
    Evolutionary psychologists, among others, have used a method called “reverse engineering” to uncover ( a ) whether a trait was selected for, and ( b ) if so, why that trait was selected for. In this paper I argue that reverse engineering cannot deliver on either ( a ) or ( b ), and tends to pervert, rather than enhance, our knowledge of natural history. In particular, I expose as false a fundamental assumption of reverse engineering—namely, that all traits selected for a particular function will…Read more
  •  35
    Darwin's laws
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1): 269-280. 2012.
  •  694
    Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Exploring Laws in Distant and Lonely Worlds
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 23 (3): 265-276. 2009.
    Do the laws of nature supervene on ordinary, non-nomic matters of fact? Lange's criticism of Humean supervenience (HS) plays a key role in his account of natural laws. Though we are sympathetic to his account, we remain unconvinced by his criticism. We focus on his thought experiment involving a world containing nothing but a lone proton and argue that it does not cast sufficient doubt on HS. In addition, we express some concern about locating the lawmakers in an ontology of primitive subjunctiv…Read more
  •  38
    Gould’s Laws
    Philosophy of Science 82 (1): 1-20. 2015.
    Much of Stephen Jay Gould’s legacy is dominated by his views on the contingency of evolutionary history expressed in his classic Wonderful Life. However, Gould also campaigned relentlessly for a “nomothetic” paleontology. How do these commitments hang together? I argue that Gould’s conception of science and natural law combined with his commitment to contingency to produce an evolutionary science centered around the formulation of higher-level evolutionary laws
  •  149
    Sexual selection and mate choice in evolutionary psychology
    Biology and Philosophy 23 (1): 115-128. 2008.
    The importance of mate choice and sexual selection has been emphasized by the majority of evolutionary psychologists. This paper assesses three cases of work on mate choice and sexual selection in evolutionary psychology: David Buss on cross-cultural human mate preferences, Randy Thornhill and Steve Gangestad on the link between mate preferences and fluctuating asymmetry, and Geoffrey Miller on the role of Fisher’s runaway process in human evolution. A mixture of conceptual and empirical problem…Read more
  •  13
    Darwin’s laws
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1): 269-280. 2012.
  •  22
    It’s a process: Searching for meaning among the microbes (review)
    Metascience 23 (2): 293-296. 2013.
    John Dupré has spent his career pushing against boundaries in biology and its philosophy. In the process of building a cottage industry out of disrupting what appeared to be fairly settled biological categories, Dupré managed to articulate an influential general metaphysics of science that was able to give us much of what we wanted from scientific realism while still remaining faithful to the heterodox duprévity of the “Disunity of Science” school. All the while, his work in these domains mainta…Read more